4 ms·

being a "prompt engineer" is hardly programming

gosub100 3y ago
I agree. I think we'll see similar results to 1980s when you needed $10k of equipment to make movies/videos vs today when Youtube and cheap storage/cameras democratizing video into "content". It's going to have a mix of breakthroughs and junk.
- johnsutor 3y ago
  I think it's definitely coming, with more recent advances in unsupervised learning and multimodal learning (along the lines of https://github.com/microsoft/unilm https://github.com/microsoft/unilm or https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory)
mgkimsal 3y ago
Used to just mean 'shows up on time' ;) I do think the idea of 'prompt engineering' isn't 'programming' in the low-level sense, but it's close enough for some peoples' needs to qualify, and will be a useful skill. But I think it'll be more like "being good at searching google" was a few years back. There was a period where you could be very productive understanding a few things about searching (filtering/keyword stuff, mostly) but that 'skill' isn't as useful today as google continues to put less emphasis on keeping those tools useful. Similarly, being good with Excel. That's extremely powerful for a lot of people in their day to day jobs. Is it 'programming' in the classical hacker-at-a-desktop sense? No, but allowing people to get value from the computers in a way that's under their control (broad definition, I know) does, imo, fall under a large banner of 'programming'.
- purpleflame1257 3y ago
  I take your point, but when you learn to actually code VBA in Excel, you get a lot more functionality.
  - mgkimsal 3y ago
    Yep - VBA - you're in 'programming' territory for sure at that point.
ActionHank 3y ago
To be fair they mentioned GPT and not ChatGPT. That said I don't believe using ChatGPT to hobble together some python code to call the GPT API would constitute "learning to program" any more than nailing two boards together makes you a capable carpenter.
lebean 3y ago
Sure, but there are people who have picked up Python, play with openai APIs, then realized how easy it is the glue stuff together, then all hell breaks loose. Branched off into using LLMs locally, or deep learning with fastai, or inspired to learn web dev, or whatever else. They may not get a job or really know what they're doing in the mere months they've put in, but that hasn't been too different from what some code bootcamps have produced. But it sure is empowering to people who, up to this point, haven't had a reason to learn Python.
jp42 3y ago
If someone non programmer cab build useful things using chatgpt or similar tools. Its not too bad to call them programmer.
skeeter2020 3y ago
"prompt engineer" == my generation's "good at googling"

I agree. I think we'll see similar results to 1980s when you needed $10k of equipment to make movies/videos vs today when Youtube and cheap storage/cameras democratizing video into "content". It's going to have a mix of breakthroughs and junk.

johnsutor 3y ago
I think it's definitely coming, with more recent advances in unsupervised learning and multimodal learning (along the lines of https://github.com/microsoft/unilm https://github.com/microsoft/unilm or https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory)

mgkimsal 3y ago

Used to just mean 'shows up on time' ;) I do think the idea of 'prompt engineering' isn't 'programming' in the low-level sense, but it's close enough for some peoples' needs to qualify, and will be a useful skill. But I think it'll be more like "being good at searching google" was a few years back. There was a period where you could be very productive understanding a few things about searching (filtering/keyword stuff, mostly) but that 'skill' isn't as useful today as google continues to put less emphasis on keeping those tools useful. Similarly, being good with Excel. That's extremely powerful for a lot of people in their day to day jobs. Is it 'programming' in the classical hacker-at-a-desktop sense? No, but allowing people to get value from the computers in a way that's under their control (broad definition, I know) does, imo, fall under a large banner of 'programming'.

purpleflame1257 3y ago
I take your point, but when you learn to actually code VBA in Excel, you get a lot more functionality.
- mgkimsal 3y ago
  Yep - VBA - you're in 'programming' territory for sure at that point.

ActionHank 3y ago

To be fair they mentioned GPT and not ChatGPT. That said I don't believe using ChatGPT to hobble together some python code to call the GPT API would constitute "learning to program" any more than nailing two boards together makes you a capable carpenter.

lebean 3y ago

Sure, but there are people who have picked up Python, play with openai APIs, then realized how easy it is the glue stuff together, then all hell breaks loose. Branched off into using LLMs locally, or deep learning with fastai, or inspired to learn web dev, or whatever else. They may not get a job or really know what they're doing in the mere months they've put in, but that hasn't been too different from what some code bootcamps have produced. But it sure is empowering to people who, up to this point, haven't had a reason to learn Python.

jp42 3y ago

If someone non programmer cab build useful things using chatgpt or similar tools. Its not too bad to call them programmer.

skeeter2020 3y ago

"prompt engineer" == my generation's "good at googling"